Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes Read Online Free PDF Page A

make it in a minute, you have a minute to rest. If you make it in a minute fifty-nine seconds, you have a second to rest. But that ain’t all. To remain in the workout, you must hit your time standard or faster, which is figured at ten to fifteen seconds slower than your best time in a meet, depending on who you are and what you swim. Miss your standard, swim no more. Also, every fifteenth hundred is butterfly, and like Walker Dupree in a book called Stotan! my idea of hell is swimming butterfly down a one-lane pool into infinity.
    A sane person would miss his time standard after about twenty and call it a day, but no true swimmer fits that description even loosely. There’s something about shared pain that keeps you going when you might back off on your own. And I would cram my tongue into a beehive and wiggle it wildly before letting her hear this,but when somebody puts as much into us as Lemry does, I’d die before wimping out on her. That goes for most of the rest of the team, too.
    Ellerby and I whip the Cruiser through the snowy back streets of Spokane, Mahalia Jackson wailing “The Lord’s Prayer” through the speaker mounted on the roof. I crouch low in the seat, my stocking cap pulled low in hopes I won’t be arrested as an accomplice to desanctifying the word of God.
    The Cruiser has caused a bit of a crack in the solidarity of our team—maybe even a chasm. Make that an abyss. Last year, Mark Brittain, who has brothers named Matthew, Luke, and John and a sister named Mary—need I say more?—beseeched Lemry to prohibit Ellerby from driving it to meets, including those at our own school, and to put a major squelch on his sacrilegious antics whenever he is any way representing the school or the team. Lemry told Mark to read the U.S. Constitution. Instead, Mark logged fifty more hours watching the Trinity Network, then took his complaint to the administration—with a petition signed by twenty-five or thirty of his faithful followers—requesting not only that Ellerby be banned from representing the school in his loathsome powder blue monstrosity, but that it also be outlawed in the student parking lotnow and forever more, world without end, amen. Brittain had a friend in high places, because Mautz is the vice-principal here at MacArthur now, and Ellerby is about an ear hair above me and Sarah Byrnes on his list of primary candidates for live organ donors. Luckily for all us backers of western democracy, Mr. Patterson, our principal, is a man of justice and vision and knows—though he would never say it—that Mautz is a wart on the butt of humanity. Anyway, Patterson keeps Mautz from turning MacArthur into a prison camp, and that means the Christian Cruiser rolls on past the scorn of Mark Brittain and his disciples.
    I should probably also mention that Ellerby’s dad is a preacher. He’s the white, stiff-round-collar man at St. Mark’s Episcopal church, where Ellerby wears a robe and lights the candles every week. And they call me an enigma.
    My best hundred freestyle—a freak performance, actually—took me a little under 52 seconds to complete, so my time standard is 1.02. Lemry’s kind and rounds her numbers up. I’m best at long distances, the five hundred and 1650 freestyles, so time standards are probably easier for me to hit. Ellerby is a flyer—so much a flyer that his best hundred fly time is almost the same as his best hundred free, which is the fastest on theteam. That gives him an advantage over me in this workout, because the fly requirement every fifteenth hundred makes me consider suicide, while it recharges him. I may have said—there’s something seriously wrong with Ellerby.
    The time span on this workout is more than three hours, but probably only five or six of us will go the distance. When someone misses a standard, they remain and cheer the others on, and afterward Lemry will provide pizza, delivered hot and